In his atelier in Higashi-Kitazawa, Tokyo, the contemporary sumi-e painter Shukou Tsuchiya speaks of a sensation he calls shitomeru — literally "to bring down," as in hunting, but used here for the single, irreversible stroke that must succeed on the first attempt, drawn with the whole body and spirit concentrated into it.
A thousand-year lineage that arrived with Buddhism in the sixth century and was pared down alongside Zen; the most primal tools — brush, ink, inkstone; and a view of inheritance which holds that tradition is not something to preserve but something to keep renewing — these emerge quietly, yet firmly.
A back alley in Higashi-Kitazawa, the second floor of an office building. Open the door, and a thin scent of ink rises; along the entire right wall, large sheets of washi hang from an iron bar suspended from the ceiling, held in place by magnets. Bare concrete floor, wooden frames, and in the back a small kitchen where one can cook for guests. The atelier of sumi-e painter Shukou Tsuchiya is less a traditional studio than a keikoba — a training space closer in spirit to a dōjō than to a studio, where the act of practice is itself the work.
More than thirty years have passed since his teacher Terayama Nanyō told him, at eighteen, that he had "the bearing of a future master." He has rooted himself deeply in the classical lineage while repeatedly stepping outside its frame. What follows is a reading of the thought inside a single stroke, the thousand-year craft that supports the brush, and the air of a keikoba opened to the present.
The beginning was a wall in his grandfather's inn. At the inn his maternal grandfather ran in Gero Onsen, Gifu, many ink paintings and ukiyo-e prints, purchased from traveling merchants who came from Nagoya, hung on the walls. As a child, Tsuchiya would stop in front of them.
Toguri: What is your earliest memory of being drawn to ink painting?
Tsuchiya: My maternal grandfather ran an inn at Gero Onsen, and when business was going well, he bought many ukiyo-e and ink paintings from traveling merchants who came from Nagoya, and hung them around the inn. As a child I loved walking among them — there was a kind of excitement and feeling I couldn't quite name. My father's side was from Aomori, and my grandmother used to send things like Nebuta paintings. So I had many chances to encounter pictures drawn with the brush.
The other thing was a tale from rakugo, the classical Japanese comic storytelling tradition — a piece called Nukesuzume, "The Sparrow That Flew Off." My father used to leave a cassette tape playing by my bedside, and it was on there. A penniless traveler pays his lodging by drawing a sparrow on a folding screen, and the next morning the sparrow flies right out of the screen. It looks scribbled, but in fact it's drawn with extraordinary lines — that image stayed in my head from childhood, and I vaguely thought, I would like to paint that picture someday. I still haven't been able to.
Toguri: You actually took up the brush at eighteen.
Tsuchiya: Yes. At the time I was living the exact opposite of an ink-painter's life — riding an American motorcycle, in a leather jacket and leather pants. But I said to my mother, "I'd like to try this a little," and it turned out a well-known teacher lived nearby. So I went, still in my leather jacket, and was suddenly told, "You have a feel for it. You should do this properly."
Toguri: A few sessions later, I understand your teacher Terayama Nanyō said something striking to you.
Tsuchiya: Yes. It was really only my fourth or fifth time there. The teacher watched the way I held the brush and said, "This boy has the bearing of a future master." There were many elderly students around, and they were astonished — "Sensei, what are you saying about an eighteen-year-old?" I didn't think I was doing anything unusual; I was just holding it the way it came naturally. But he could apparently see something there — what teachers in the tradition call sō, a kind of physiognomic reading by which an old master senses a student's future in the way they hold the brush.
From then on I was drawn into ink painting as if pulled in. At a pace that would normally be unthinkable, I became a shihan — a certified instructor rank within the lineage, permitting one to teach — in two years, and from twenty-one I began teaching others myself.
Toguri: To stand on the teaching side as a shihan is quite an early timing.
Tsuchiya: It was early. But teaching means you have to paint in front of your students. Our school never hands out printed examples. We always paint in front of them. No matter how many people are watching, we paint. It's tremendous pressure, but as both mental and technical training, there could be nothing better. To produce a stable, steady ink tone in front of others, without being shaken — the accumulation of that experience is what my foundation rests on now.
The excitement felt in his grandfather's inn, the sparrow that flew out of a rakugo tale, the sō told to him by his teacher. What had been separate points were tied into a single line in the spring of his eighteenth year. From there he stepped into the position of an inheritor at an exceptional pace. But why this single stroke is approached with the tension of shitomeru — that question begins with the physical properties of brush and paper.
What comes to mind when one hears "ink painting" may be a quiet movement of the brush. But the moment of making that Tsuchiya describes is closer to the bodily conduct of an athlete. A stroke once drawn cannot be undone. Precisely because of this, the entire weight of the body, the breath, and the state of mind ride on that single stroke.
Toguri: How do you yourself approach the fact that, in ink painting, a stroke once drawn cannot be taken back?
Tsuchiya: Many people have had the experience of being scolded by their elementary school calligraphy teacher — "You went over that line twice, didn't you?" Even the slightest overlap shows up as a visible line. And the ink itself becomes muddier the more it is layered. The fewer strokes used, the more the ink's transparency and tonal gradation come through on their own. There's a term for this — the genpitsu aesthetic, the aesthetic of reduced brushstrokes — and in ink painting, layering is almost fatal.
That is why we use the word shitomeru. The brush can be placed here only once. The moment you decide to draw a line from here to there, the path, the angle, the speed — all of it has to be drawn inside your body in advance. If your arm does not move exactly that way, it does not become a line.
Toguri: Is that not only a matter of arm movement, then?
Tsuchiya: Not at all. The fingertips are holding the brush, but what is actually moving is the whole body. Is my weight now on my left foot, or on my right? If I'm going to move the brush in one direction, I have to leave my center of gravity on the opposite side beforehand, or the brush won't reach. The movement of the shoulders, the upper body, the lower body — I'm thinking of all of it in relative terms while I paint.
Lately I often paint on washi attached to the wall, and when facing the wall the lower back tends to rise along with the work. I keep myself in a position where the relationship between my body and the work is nearly the same as when I'm painting on a desk. I make those judgments intuitively as I go.
Toguri: Within that concentration, what are you actually looking at while you paint?
Tsuchiya: In the end, it may be close to a trance state. It feels as though the brush is growing directly out of my body. Lines come out of my body the way they would in automatic writing. Up to that point, there are phones ringing, stray thoughts, all kinds of things shaking me, but at the last there is a moment when the brain enters something like a meditative state, and the body, the brush, and the ink become one.
What I am seeing then is probably energy. The energy a human being holds, the energy of life, the energy of the universe. At the same time, tenderness and softness are there in equal mass. I want to draw a single stroke in which the strong and the gentle live together.
Toguri: I'd like to ask about yohaku as well — the reserved space, not merely empty space, in an ink painting. To Western readers, the concept can sometimes seem mysterious.
Tsuchiya: In Western culture, there is a sense that using more of the available space, expressing more, conveys more information to the viewer. Japan probably has the opposite sensibility. In a place where there is nothing, you paint just one point, making the most of the empty space around it. By doing so, the meaning of that single point is concentrated and emphasized.
At the same time, yohaku is also a space for the viewer to project their own memory. If you fill it in, everything becomes the painter's ego pressed upon the viewer. By leaving yohaku, the experiences and remembered landscapes the viewer has lived can be layered onto it. Yohaku exists as the place where the landscape the painter proposes and the landscape inside the viewer come together. In a sense, I think it is the most primal, the simplest, and the most powerful interactive art.
To shitomeru a stroke is not a matter of technique. It is the act of letting one's body and mind, in that moment, be taken up by ink and washi. And yohaku is not a space the painter monopolizes; it is designed as a place to which the viewer is invited. Then why did ink painting develop in this direction? — The clue lies within a lineage nearly fourteen hundred years long.
The "aesthetic of paring away" in ink painting was not there from the start. When it first reached Japan, it was the outline of a buddha figure; later, the colorful court paintings of China; and, over time, something subtracted from, little by little, within Japan. Tsuchiya speaks of his own school's position within that long current.
Toguri: I understand that ink painting was born in China. Could you walk us through how it came to Japan?
Tsuchiya: Ink painting originally began in China, and around the sixth century, when Buddhism was transmitted to Japan, what came across were hakubyō-ga — paintings of buddha figures rendered only in outline. That was when Japanese people first encountered images drawn in ink.
After that, from the thirteenth century onward, more grand Chinese ink paintings with tonal gradation entered Japan, and were given a uniquely Japanese reading. Beginning with Sesshū, there was a long era when those painting were monks — gasō, or painter-monks, who would dominate the tradition for centuries. In that process, together with the Japanese sense of wabi-sabi, ink painting was gradually pared down. Originally, in China, ink painting was often academy-style work or lavish pieces offered to the throne; in Japan it joined the minimalism of Zen and became work with fewer elements.
Toguri: If you were to name the representative schools within Japan, where would you start?
Tsuchiya: Setting aside what came from China, in terms of who served the warrior society and the Edo shogunate, the Kanō school is famous. The "painter" figure who shows up in rakugo and old tales is usually a Kanō painter. What the Kanō school pursued was grandeur — painting as a symbol of the shogunate's power. How widely a sliding-door painting could be stretched horizontally, how broadly a pine tree's branches could be extended to assert its presence.
The school that pushed back against this, as if to ask, "Is that really how it should be painted?", was the Hasegawa school of Hasegawa Tōhaku. It is not very well-known in the world at large, but on those lavish gold screens they painted with an ink so thin it nearly disappeared. They were the first school to bring yūgen — a sense of profound, shaded depth, a fading quality, a worldview closer to Japanese sensibility — into the mainstream.
Toguri: I hear there was also a stream of realism.
Tsuchiya: Yes. A man of extraordinary realist talent, Maruyama Ōkyo, emerged. This has to do with his upbringing. There was a toy imported from Holland called megane-e — an optical device with a lens, through which scenes drawn in one-point perspective appeared three-dimensional. Ōkyo came from a poor family and was apprenticed to draw the underdrawings for these toys. He began using that technique when he painted ink paintings of his own. He was the first painter in Japan to draw an ink painting of a pine tree extending into the depths — three-dimensionally — set apart from the Kanō school's horizontally extending compositions.
Katsushika Hokusai belonged to a different school, but stood close to this lineage. His image is strongly tied to ukiyo-e prints, but his nikuhitsuga — original brush paintings, as opposed to woodblock prints — show an extremely high level of realism. He could paint a moving wave as if it had stopped, at a time when there were no photographs. He must have had a kind of special faculty.
Toguri: Ink painting after the modern era went through some difficulties, I understand.
Tsuchiya: Yes. From the Meiji era on, when Western culture entered Japan, there was a time when nihonga were placed in the position of being "flat and uninteresting." Then there was a movement to restore them, then they were dropped again, then restored again — and this cycle continues today. Even when I started learning, people often said, "Why are you doing such a strange thing?" But now, having come around once more, an era is arriving in which a tatami room with a tokonoma and a kakejiku is again considered cool.
Toguri: Where do you yourself stand in this lineage?
Tsuchiya: I was taught by two teachers, Saitō Nanboku and Terayama Nanyō. If you trace this teaching lineage back six generations, you actually arrive at Maruyama Ōkyo. I belong to a group called Nanboku Bokugakai, and I now also lead a group of my own called Bokusenkai. In broad terms, within Japanese ink painting we strongly inherit a technique that divides the three distances — near, middle, and far grounds (kinkei, chūkei, enkei) — into dark, mid, and light ink. So I do not lean too far into Ōkyo's one-point perspective. On the contrary, I think there is a particular interest in the slightly two-dimensional "unfreedom" of ink painting — that deliberately imposing the constraint is where the flavor lies.
From the outlines of buddha figures in the sixth century, joined to the spirit of Zen and pared down; the grandeur of the Kanō school standing alongside the yūgen of the Hasegawa school; the three-dimensionality brought in by Maruyama Ōkyo. And within all of this, Tsuchiya has chosen one lineage and deliberately decided not to use the techniques of another. From here, one begins to see that inheritance is not simply the work of receiving and passing on — it is the act of choosing one's position within a thousand-year map.
The tools of ink painting are remarkably few. Ink made from soot and animal glue (nikawa), a single brush, a single inkstone, and washi. With only this, the core of the Japanese sense of beauty has been painted for a thousand years. But inside that minimum set of tools, surprisingly fine choices and judgments are layered upon one another.
Toguri: Could you tell us a little about the brushes you use?
Tsuchiya: For everyday work I mostly use brushes made from horsetail hair. But I change them depending on the purpose. For instance, this weasel-hair brush has an extremely fine tip — the bristles taper so finely they almost disappear at the point. With horse hair, sometimes you cut the line off; with weasel, the very tips, where the hair is at its most vanishing, are what reach the paper, so it is suited to fine description.
There is also one called yōmō — written "sheep hair," but actually made from the chin hair of a goat. These can be ridiculously expensive too, but I use them on occasion.
Toguri: And yet I understand you don't normally use expensive brushes.
Tsuchiya: That's right. Unless there is a very specific purpose, I'm basically painting with two-thousand-yen brushes. The reason is that I run a teaching practice. When students come to learn, if I don't teach using the same kind of brushes they bring, it ends up looking like, "Of course you can paint, sensei — you're using a good brush." I want to be able to paint with the brushes they bring, in whatever condition they're in. So I try not to let my body grow accustomed to brushes that are too good.
Toguri: I've also heard there are some distinctive names for parts of the inkstone, and for ink itself.
Tsuchiya: The inkstone has a deep part and a shallow part. The deep part is called the umi — the sea — and the shallow part is called the riku, the land. When you grind ink, you fill the sea about eighty percent with water, then draw the water up onto the land and grind it slowly and in wide motions. Not short and quick, but wide and slow. The act of grinding itself becomes a kind of priming, drawing you into concentration. If you grind only a small amount each time, it takes two or three minutes, or up to five — and it settles into the body as a ritual repeated each time. It is something like a warm-up before exercise.
Toguri: I'd like to ask about technique as well. Could you name some of the main ones?
Tsuchiya: Broadly, there are two: kōroku-hō and tsuketate-hō. Kōroku-hō uses the fine tip of the brush, drawing outlines with a thin line as if with a pencil or a felt-tip pen. Tsuketate-hō uses the side of the brush — when painting leaves, for example, a single stroke already contains gradation, so light and shadow on a leaf can be expressed in two or three strokes.
There is one more, not widely known — sujime-gaki. When fresh ink is laid over an earlier stroke, the earlier stroke remains visible in front, as a kind of ridge. It is used for things like the scales of dragons and fish — Itō Jakuchū often used it for the scales of his dragons. Most people have seen it without knowing what it was.
Toguri: I hear you have also been experimenting with new materials recently.
Tsuchiya: At a solo show last September, I tried mixing ink with diatomaceous earth. Ordinary ink, even when ground very thick, still bleeds. But when you mix in diatomaceous earth and raise the viscosity, it bleeds — and then, at a certain instant, the line stops. Once it stops, it slowly begins to widen and bleed again. I found an approach I had never had before, and right now it is the experiment I am enjoying most.
Toguri: What is it that makes the brush so different from a pencil?
Tsuchiya: A pencil basically has a sharpened point that runs across the surface of the paper — it only moves in two dimensions. But the ink-painting brush has thickness, the length of its bristles, so you can push the brush into the paper, lift it, take it in and out three-dimensionally. If you move the brush as you are told — push, lift — even someone with no sense of drawing will produce the line exactly as instructed. The kind of line you cannot draw with a pencil is born from the three-dimensionality of the brush.
Soot and animal glue and water and brush, and washi. The materials themselves are minimal, but woven quietly within them are horse and weasel and goat hair, the topography of an inkstone called sea and land, a brush tip that moves in three dimensions, and a thousand years of accumulated technique. And all of this is inseparable from the body's movements — weight, elbow, shoulder, breath. For Tsuchiya, tools, body, and technique are three things forming a single mechanism.
Most inheritors of a classical tradition place preserving form above all else. Tsuchiya's position departs from that slightly. He changes in order to preserve. He changes the place in order to deliver. But this turn came only after ten years of quiet inner conflict.
Toguri: After becoming a shihan, I understand you continued for ten years without ever stepping outside of classical technique.
Tsuchiya: Ten years was a number I'd more or less arrived at on my own. Really, I thought it was a world that would not be visible without twenty. But I decided that for the first ten, I would not touch anything until the beauty of the classical was fully absorbed into my arm.
I imitated my teacher's work and drew the same things over and over. The body certainly does absorb it. But the brain grows tired. There was a part of me wanting to face outward and try something, and another part killing that off. The stress of this was pressing on me in ways I could not see.
Toguri: How did the turning point come?
Tsuchiya: I had the chance to collaborate with friends in fashion, and one of them said, "How long are you going to keep painting the same picture?" I was furious. I am doing this as classical work, I thought. But the strength of my anger caught my own attention. The fact that I was that angry meant they had stepped on something I had been suppressing for a long time. When I realized that, I thought, "All right — I have done ten years; that's enough," and there was a period when I threw what I really wanted to do, what no one else was doing, into the work.
At first I was just hurling ink onto paper, scribbling English in marker, throwing colors onto another piece — a mess. Looking back at it now, that was the shape of my own thinking at the time. I felt as if something — various kinds of grime — had come off.
Toguri: If you were to put "renewing tradition" into your own words, what would they be?
Tsuchiya: I once spoke with a well-known actress, Mitsushima Hikari. She is from Amami Ōshima and grew up in Okinawa, raised among spiritual cultures such as the yuta, the shamanic spirit-medium tradition of those islands. We were talking about how those cultures are disappearing more and more, and when I said, "It's a shame," she said: "If people lose interest, let it go."
When I heard that, I was struck. However strongly I tell myself, "I must inherit this," if the world has no interest at all, then it is only a world of self-satisfaction. In that case, it can end with my generation. But if I don't want it to end, the only choice is to change how I show it. Even when painting the same thing, change the place where it's presented. Even when using the same technique, try placing it in a different context. That small adjustment widens the base of people who might become interested.
Toguri: The first place you tried this was a live painting at a club event, I understand.
Tsuchiya: I think I might have been the first to paint ink works at a club event. I was doing solo exhibitions at the time, but at solo shows, things tend to end with "Sensei, that's amazing," and the conversation does not go anywhere. But at a club venue, with music alongside, standing a wall up, attaching washi to it, painting — over drinks, the conversation naturally extended outward. The thing I was doing did not change at all. Only the place of presentation changed, and the way it reached people changed.
Toguri: At the root of the world you want to express, what kind of view are you holding?
Tsuchiya: What I most want to express is the multiplicity of Japan — particularly the multiplicity of the city of Tokyo. Not so much cultural plurality, but the kind of multiplicity in which the analog and the technological exist in the same place. A high-rise stands right next to a shrine. The old and the new stand side by side without compromise. That sight is the figure of Tokyo, and the figure of Japan. The materials of ink painting are extremely primal — soot, animal glue, water, brush, and washi — but using these oldest materials, I can paint the air of the present city. That moment of coexistence is the most interesting world to me.
Not "closing off and preserving" tradition, but "opening it and handing it forward." This thought settled in Tsuchiya through conversations with many different people. While it appears to stand opposite to preservationism, it is in fact the most faithful inheritance of its core. Those who renewed ink painting from the sixth century onward — Sesshū, Ōkyo, Hokusai — were all, in their own time, standing at the frontier.
The Higashi-Kitazawa atelier is also a place where Tsuchiya's thinking appears directly in the design of the space. Classical and contemporary, quietness and the scent of cooking, a kamidana — the small household altar often kept in homes and workplaces — and a stove. Things that seem as though they should not meet are naturally co-present in a single room.
Toguri: Could you tell us why you chose this place?
Tsuchiya: You cannot make large works without a certain amount of space. I'd had an office in Shimokitazawa before, but I wanted to be able to paint large works, so I moved here. This entire wall is one continuous surface, and the floor allows me to spread things out. It used to be an ordinary office space, and I rebuilt all of it from scratch with this layout in mind.
The iron bar suspended from the ceiling can be raised or lowered to any height, and washi can be attached to it with magnets, anywhere I want. I designed all of this — the system, the design — from zero.
Toguri: It is striking that there is a kitchen too.
Tsuchiya: Yes, I set out a stove there so I could cook for guests. It is a place of work, but also a place to receive people. I love cooking myself, and I often do it as a kind of switch. The brain at work in cooking has the same structure as making a piece — using the skills you have and the materials at hand, or ingredients in this case, to make something to your own taste by a particular time. Only cooking finishes in an instant, and pleases someone in an instant. So it resets me at a different speed from the long time-scale of painting.
Toguri: You have a kamidana enshrined as well.
Tsuchiya: Yes, the kamidana is properly enshrined, and I change the sakaki — the evergreen branch placed as an offering. But I'm always busy, so I do not necessarily bring my palms together every time I come in. Even so, I do treasure these things — the kamidana, a sense of o-kiyome, the act of clearing one's state before beginning work.
Toguri: What do people most often say they feel when they first step into the atelier?
Tsuchiya: Many say there is a distinct air about it. The concrete floor, the washi, the smell of ink, the iron bar, the stove in the kitchen. Each one of them, on its own, is not all that special, but having them co-present in a single place may be a little unusual. The "Tokyo where the old and the new stand side by side without compromise" — which is what I want to express — has more or less become the room itself.
An iron bar and magnetized washi. A concrete floor and a kamidana. A stove and an inkstone. Here, things from different eras quietly coexist. Just as Tsuchiya's work places classical technique and fluorescent color on the same sheet, the atelier too layers the analog and the technological, the quiet gesture and the everyday, into one room. The place itself is the embodiment of his view of inheritance.
At Tsuchiya's atelier, all kinds of people pick up the brush — visitors from abroad, professionals worn out from work. What he first teaches a beginner is not how to draw a picture, but posture, breath, and the shosa — the prepared, formal movement — of grinding ink. For Tsuchiya, grinding ink, holding the brush, and breathing are themselves shosa: not preparation for the art, but already the art itself. The keiko of ink painting begins before the painting begins.
Toguri: When a guest comes to the atelier, what do you start with first?
Tsuchiya: We start with the posture. They sit squarely at the desk, tighten the muscles around the lower back, and tuck the two sides of the hips inward so the upper body sits completely neutral on the hipbones. Not forward, not back. In a free state, the upper body rests on the lower body.
Toguri: Then the breath.
Tsuchiya: Yes. For the breath, we shorten the time of inhaling and lengthen the time of exhaling. In proportion, three for inhaling, seven for exhaling. If you make the inhale too slow, the lungs grow strained, so you inhale briefly and concentrate during the long exhale.
Toguri: I hear there are also distinctive rules for how the brush is held.
Tsuchiya: For the ink-painting brush, we add one more finger — the middle finger — to the pencil grip. Two fingers below, two above, around the exact middle of the brush. From there, the elbow lifts slightly. That is the basic posture.
Toguri: I understand there is a particular method for loading the brush with ink as well.
Tsuchiya: There is an exercise called the five-line gradation. You first wash the brush all the way to its base and let off the excess water on the rim of the water dish. Then, in two small dishes, you have a dark ink and a light ink prepared separately. You wash the brush to the base once more, take off the water on the rim, and draw the lighter ink up about eighty percent of the brush from the base. Then the darker ink, up to fifty percent. Finally, the darkest ink, only at the tip, one or two-tenths. With this, a gradation forms automatically — water at the base, dark ink at the tip. Holding the brush in that state, you tilt it in the direction of travel and draw five lines from left to right, and each of the five lines reveals its own clean gradation.
Toguri: Can even someone who says they have "no sense of drawing" really paint?
Tsuchiya: They actually can. A pencil moves in two dimensions, but the brush moves three-dimensionally — pushing into the paper, lifting up — the length of the bristles allows this. If you move the brush as I tell you to, even someone with no drawing sense will produce the line as instructed. The action of the brush itself creates the expression of the line.
Toguri: I hear there are also classes where students draw freely.
Tsuchiya: There are abstract painting classes as well. With abstract work, there is no correct answer, so people draw from their own sense alone. We sometimes set the task without using brushes at all — drawing with paper, drawing with fingers — and I give a prompt: "Finish it in five minutes. Finish it in three." If you have twenty minutes, you start to think; but if you are told to draw in an instant, the hand keeps moving. As a result, what the person believes is their own abstract expression really comes out.
Toguri: You also have many guests from overseas, I hear.
Tsuchiya: I sometimes lecture at universities abroad. Once they asked me, in front of the students, to paint a large work in thirty minutes while explaining in English — quite an absurd request. The interest that guests from abroad have toward ink painting is often different from what we Japanese tend to expect, and I am often made aware: "So that is the lens you've come here through." That becomes a discovery for me as well.
Toguri: Finally, what would you most like people who come to the atelier to feel?
Tsuchiya: Some of the people who come to learn arrive utterly worn out from work. But as they focus on the brush and the paper and pull a line of ink, the ones who came in exhausted often go home with a refreshed expression. Ink painting, in the sense that what is drawn appears only in that moment, is irreversible. The state of one's mind in that moment comes out plainly on the paper. I think it becomes a small time of facing oneself.
Posture, breath, the way of holding the brush, the shosa of grinding ink, the way of letting the brush take up ink. What can be experienced at Tsuchiya's atelier is not so much "how to paint ink paintings," but rather the sequence by which the body, the breath, and the mind are arranged before one paints. And once that sequence has been run through the body, something has shifted slightly — whether one paints or not. That a tired visitor goes home refreshed perhaps has this structure beneath it.
On the desk in the Higashi-Kitazawa atelier, a used water dish, an inkstone with its ink already ground, and a single sheet of washi that was being painted on a moment ago remain. The scent of ink still drifts faintly in the air.
Shukou Tsuchiya's words were not an explanation of ink painting. They were a quiet report — by someone who has drawn an irreversible stroke every day — on how he has lived with the weight of that stroke. And at the same time, they are a quiet record of the practice of someone who has chosen his position within a lineage extending from the sixth century, who reads a thousand years of judgment within the minimal tools of brush and ink and inkstone, and who has shaped a room in Higashi-Kitazawa into a small reflection of Tokyo.
The sense of shitomeru. The expression that the stroke does not get drawn, it arrives. The view of inheritance as "a tradition that lives by being renewed." These words take on their real texture only in the air of his atelier. How the brush enters the paper and how it leaves. The speed at which the hand turns while grinding ink. The instant at which breath and weight are tied into a single stroke. — If one wishes to reach not the words, but the shosa itself, the door beyond this point is opened just a little further.